Disaster Relief Medicaid Evaluation Project

[Excerpt] This study is a retrospective evaluation of the enrollment processes and service delivery associated with DRM. It examines this unexpected experiment and assesses the outcomes. This report begins with an overview of the Medicaid/Family Health Plus program in September 2001, and is followed by a description of the challenges of, and responses to, the World Trade Center disaster. It then looks at how well the DRM process worked, how accessible needed services were for recipients, how costs compared to costs associated with those previously enrolled in the traditional Medicaid program, and how the different eligibility/verification procedures affected program integrity. Finally, in the section Background Information: Detailed History of Disaster Relief Medicaid, it presents a narrative timeline, detailing the decision steps by which DRM was implemented

Why Consumers Pay Voluntarily: Evidence from Online Music

Customers at the online music label Magnatune can pay what they want for albums, as long as the payment is within a given price range ($5-$18). Magnatune recommends to pay $8, and on average customers paid$8.20 (Regner and Barria, 2009). We ran an online survey and collected responses from 227 frequent Magnatune customers to gain insights about the underlying motivations to pay more than necessary. We control for individual response- and sample selection-bias, and find that reciprocity and guilt appear to be the major drivers for generous voluntary payments. Being inclined to follow social norms is a positive determinant for payments around the recommended price.social preferences, other-regarding behaviour, music industry, reciprocity, guilt, social norms, altruism, fairness, social-image concerns, survey

The Future of the Internet III

Presents survey results on technology experts' predictions on the Internet's social, political, and economic impact as of 2020, including its effects on integrity and tolerance, intellectual property law, and the division between personal and work lives

Freedom for scholarship in the internet age

Discusses the purpose of scholarship, the potential of the internet to further the purposes of scholarship, and the role of librarians in transformative change in scholarly communication. Addresses the rapidly growing volume of information, and discusses three approaches to coping; writing less and collaborating are recommended. Talks about the work of librarians in scholarly communication as the basis for opening up conversation on broader change. Presents evidence that a fully open access scholarly journal publishing system would be possible at much lower cost than libraries are currently paying

Measuring subjective wellbeing: recommendations on measures for use by national governments

Governments around the world are now beginning to seriously consider the use of measures of subjective wellbeing (SWB) – ratings of thoughts and feelings about life – for monitoring progress and for informing and appraising public policy. The mental state account of wellbeing upon which SWB measures are based can provide useful additional information about who is doing well and badly in life when compared to that provided by the objective list and preference satisfaction accounts. It may be particularly useful when deciding how best to allocate scarce resources, where it is desirable to express the benefits of intervention in a single metric that can be compared to the costs of intervention. There are three main concepts of SWB in the literature – evaluation (life satisfaction), experience (momentary mood) and eudemonia (purpose) – and policy-makers should seek to measure all three, at least for the purposes of monitoring progress. There are some major challenges to the use of SWB measures. Two related and well-rehearsed issues are the effects of expectations and adaptation on ratings. The degree to which we should allow wellbeing to vary according to expectations and adaptation are vexing moral problems but information on SWB can highlight what difference allowing for these considerations would have in practice (e.g. in informing prioiritisation decisions), which can then be fed into the normative debate. There are also questions about precisely what attention should be drawn to in SWB questions and how to capture the ratings of those least inclined to take part in surveys, but these can be addressed through more widespread use of SWB. We also provide some concrete recommendations about precisely what questions should be asked in large-scale surveys, and these recommendations have been taken up by the Office of National Statistics in the UK and are being looked at closely by the OECD

The Information Commons: a public policy report

This report describes the history of the information commons, presents examples of online commons that provide new ways to store and deliver information, and concludes with policy recommendations. Available in PDF and HTML versions.BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE at NYU SCHOOL OF LAW Democracy Program, Free Expression Policy Project 161 Avenue of the Americas, 12th floor New York NY 10013 Phone: (212) 998-6730 Web site: www.brennancenter.org Free Expression Policy Project: www.fepproject.or